We chose the Allure of the Seas because we wanted to try one of the big, big ships. We had never sailed on an Oasis class ship; in fact, we had never sailed with Royal Caribbean before. We had sailed exclusively with Princess and Celebrity. We do not regret our decision to sail on the Allure of the Seas.

We flew from Ottawa to Fort Lauderdale on February 23 and stayed in the Courtyard on Fort Lauderdale Beach as I am a Marriott gold member and I am generally loyal to Marriott hotels. The hotel is not the highest end luxury property but it is not bad and it is clean and it is right on the beach. On the morning of our cruise we took a taxi over to the port as our check in time was 11:00-11:30. It seemed a bit chaotic at first with passengers from the previous cruise still leaving the area but once we got inside things went very smooth. We were on the ship within 30 minutes. The one thing that I thought was strange was that when I checked in on line I uploaded our pictures but at the port they took our pictures again. Our first impression was wow! The ship is clean, well laid out and beautiful. We were very impressed. We went up to Central Park (we were very impressed with Central Park) and even had to wait a few minutes for the Park Café to open but when it did we had roast beef sandwiches which were excellent. After lunch we headed over to Central Park 150 to make our reservations for the speciality restaurants. Easy peasy and we got the restaurants and times that we wanted. We had the 4 night package on top of the first night at the Izumi Hibachi Grill.

At 1:00 PM we were allowed to go to our ocean view stateroom on deck 10 port side. We had room 10206 which was almost exactly mid-ship with a balcony that was slightly larger than most. This stateroom had the bed next to the balcony. Our first impression of the room was that it was small but efficient. I guess that we got used to it later on and didn’t find it so small. There was plenty of storage place for us despite the fact that we over packed. While there, before we even met our stateroom attendant there was a knock at the door and lo and behold there was delivered to us a plate of chocolate covered strawberries and a bottle of champagne. Don’t know why we received this because there was no note. We never figured it out. We met our stateroom attendant, Darwin later in the afternoon. He was very helpful and efficient. Whatever we needed or requested, he got for us. He was very good with the towel animals. Another interesting occurrence was that the very first afternoon we smelled cigarette smoke on our balcony (not allowed), reported it to Darwin and never smelled smoke again. I had pre-purchased the internet for two devices and through wi-fi calling I was able to call home to see how the family was doing. There seemed to be pretty good bandwidth as well. I had no issues setting up my devices. Read more